HOWARD STRINGER: MAN OF THE MOMENT AT CBS

With the resignation of Van Gordon Sauter as CBS News president, Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born, Oxford-educated veteran of the Vietnam War, began his first day Friday in the network news wars as the temporary but possibly permanent chief of CBS News.

After Sauter’s exit Thursday, Stringer, 44, executive vice president of CBS News since 1984, was put in charge of CBS News until a permanent president is picked.

A tall, normally genial and outgoing man who has been visibly tense during the recent months of much publicized turmoil and dissension within CBS News, Stringer was not available for an interview at press time Friday.

A CBS spokeswoman in New York said Stringer was busy in meetings with his boss, CBS Broadcast Group President Gene F. Jankowski. While the nature of the meeting was not disclosed, it was likely that two major items were on the agenda:

--The once-dominant “CBS Evening News,” whose ratings leadership has been challenged this year by the resurgent “NBC Nightly News” and, to some extent, by ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

--CBS News’ 6-7:30 a.m. “hard news” portion of the network’s new three-hour morning effort scheduled to premiere in January as a successor to the low-rated “CBS Morning News,” which is being axed after 23 years of effort and a series of new anchors and formats.

Speculation about Sauter’s successor has included retired CBS News executive Burton Benjamin as a short-term president; Bill Moyers, who says he is leaving CBS News in November to return to public TV, and David Burke, ABC News executive vice president.

Also mentioned in the speculation is CBS News veteran Don Hewitt, executive producer of the high-rated “60 Minutes” series and a friend of both CBS founder William S. Paley and CBS’ new acting chief executive Laurence A. Tisch.

But Stringer also is considered in the running. One senior CBS executive who requested anonymity said that was the word given top CBS News staffers by Jankowski during a meeting Thursday afternoon at the network’s headquarters in New York.

Jankowski “didn’t give any suggestion of when there would be a permanent CBS News president,” the executive said, “but he did say Howard (Stringer) would be a candidate.”

Observers expect that much attention now will be focused on Stringer’s actions as the division’s interim boss and how he shoulders the pressures and attendant publicity of his new, temporary job.

He’s starting off with a measure of respect from his colleagues, according to one veteran CBS correspondent who asked not to be identified.

“He’s very highly regarded among the line-level troops as a working journalist,” the correspondent said Friday. “He’s a guy with a lot of hands-on experience. . . .”

That experience includes work as executive producer of a string of generally well-received “CBS Reports” documentaries. The programs include a controversial 1982 Vietnam documentary that led to Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s since-dropped $120-million libel suit against CBS.

Executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” from December, 1981, to January, 1984, Stringer also is credited with helping Dan Rather get over a shaky start and a momentary slump in ratings when he succeeded Walter Cronkite in 1982.

Stringer’s changes on the program included a move away from strictly Washington journalism to reports from areas in the nation affected by events in Washington, and to longer pieces that tried to put the day’s major stories into perspective.

Born in Cardiff, Wales, and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, Stringer emigrated to the United States in 1965, low on funds but high in hopes. He began his CBS career as a log clerk at CBS-owned WCBS-TV in New York. Later drafted into the Army, he spent a year in Vietnam as a military policeman.

After Vietnam, he went to work for CBS News and began his rapid rise upward in 1968 as a researcher for “CBS Reports,” working for such top CBS documentary makers as John Sharnik, Perry Wolfe and Benjamin.

(Benjamin, ironically, later was to conduct an internal probe of the Vietnam documentary that led to Westmoreland’s lawsuit.)

Whether Stringer would want to become permanent president of CBS News is debated within the news division. “I don’t think he’d want that,” one insider said. “He’s a creative guy, not an administrator.”

However, Lane Venardos, who succeeded Stringer as executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” in 1984, said that “my belief is he does” want the job, although he added that he hasn’t discussed the matter with Stringer.

“He’s a good man, a good leader of people,” said Venardos, now an executive producer with CBS News’ special projects division. “I have nothing but the highest personal and professional respect for him.”

And although Stringer has moved up the executive ladder, he still works closely with the troops, Venardos said. He cited CBS’ “48 Hours on Crack Street” news special, which was 12th in national Nielsen ratings for prime-time programs last week.

Venardos was the program’s executive producer. But Stringer, he said, “was the person who conceived it.”